“If he’s one of them he’s not a priest anymore. Don’t call him Father.”
“They still call him Father.”
“Who?”
“The vampires.”
Zev watched Father Joe’s jaw muscles bunch.
Joe said, “Maybe I’ll just take a quick trip over to St. Anthony’s myself—”
“No. It’s different here. The area is thick with them—maybe twenty times as many as in Spring Lake. They’ll get you if your timing isn’t just right. I’ll take you.”
“You need rest, pal.”
Father Joe’s expression showed genuine concern. Zev was detecting increasingly softer emotions in the man since their reunion last night. A good sign perhaps?
“And rest I’ll get when we get to where I’m taking you.”
IV
Father Joe Cahill watched the moon rise over his old church and wondered at the wisdom of coming back. The casual decision made this morning in the full light of day seemed reckless and foolhardy now at the approach of midnight.
But there was no turning back. He’d followed Zev to the second floor of this two-story office building across the street from St. Anthony’s, and here they’d waited for dark. Must have been a law-office once. The place had been vandalized, the windows broken, the furniture trashed, but there was an old Temple University Law School degree on the wall, and the couch was still in one piece. So while Zev caught some Z’s, Joe sat and sipped a little of his scotch and did some heavy thinking.
Mostly he thought about his drinking. He’d done too much of that lately, he knew; so much so that he was afraid to stop cold. So he was taking just a touch now, barely enough to take the edge off. He’d finish the rest later, after he came back from that church over there.
He’d stared at St. Anthony’s since they’d arrived. It too had been extensively vandalized. Once it had been a beautiful little stone church, a miniature cathedral, really; very Gothic with all its pointed arches, steep roofs, crocketed spires, and multi-foil stained glass windows. Now the windows were smashed, the crosses which had topped the steeple and each gable were gone, and anything resembling a cross in its granite exterior had been defaced beyond recognition.
As he’d known it would, the sight of St. Anthony’s brought back memories of Gloria Sullivan, the young, pretty church volunteer whose husband worked for United Chemical International in New York, commuting in every day and trekking off overseas a little too often. Joe and Gloria had seen a lot of each other around the church offices and had become good friends. But Gloria had somehow got the idea that what they had went beyond friendship, so she showed up at the rectory one night when Joe was there alone. He tried to explain that as attractive as she was, she was not for him. He had taken certain vows and meant to stick by them. He did his best to let her down easy but she’d been hurt. And angry.
That might have been that, but then her six-year-old son Kevin had come home from altar boy practice with a story about a priest making him pull down his pants and touching him. Kevin was never clear on who the priest had been, but Gloria Sullivan was. Obviously it had been Father Cahill—any man who could turn down the heartfelt offer of her love and her body had to be either a queer or worse. And a child molester was worse.
She took it to the police and to the papers.
Joe groaned softly at the memory of how swiftly his life had become hell. But he had been determined to weather the storm, sure that the real culprit eventually would be revealed. He had no proof—still didn’t—but if one of the priests at St. Anthony’s was a pederast, he knew it wasn’t him. That left Father Alberto Palmeri, St. Anthony’s fifty-five-year-old pastor. Before Joe could get to the truth, however, Father Palmeri requested that Father Cahill be removed from the parish, and the bishop complied. Joe had left under a cloud that had followed him to the retreat house in the next county and hovered over him till this day. The only place he’d found even brief respite from the impotent anger and bitterness that roiled under his skin and soured his gut every minute of every day was in the bottle—and that was sure as hell a dead end.
So why had he agreed to come back here? To torture himself? Or to get a look at Palmeri and see how low he had sunk?
Maybe that was it. Maybe seeing Palmeri wallowing in his true element would give him the impetus to put the whole St. Anthony’s incident behind him and rejoin what was left of the human race—which needed him now more than ever.
And maybe it wouldn’t.
Getting back on track was a nice thought, but over the past few months Joe had found it increasingly difficult to give much of a damn about anyone or anything.
Except maybe Zev. He’d stuck by Joe through the worst of it, defending him to anyone who would listen. But an endorsement from an Orthodox rabbi had meant diddly in St Anthony’s. And yesterday Zev had biked all the way to Spring Lake to see him. Old Zev was all right.
And he’d been right about the number of vampires here too. Lakewood was crawling with the things. Fascinated and repelled, Joe had watched the streets fill with them shortly after sundown.
But what had disturbed him more were the creatures who’d come out before sundown.
The humans. Live ones.
The collaborators.
If there was anything lower, anything that deserved true death more than the vampires themselves, it was the still-living humans who worked for them.
Someone touched his shoulder and he jumped. It was Zev. He was holding something out to him. Joe took it and held it up in the moonlight: a tiny crescent moon dangling from a chain on a ring.
“What’s this?”
“An earring. The local Vichy wear them.”
“Vichy? Like the Vichy French?”
“Yes. Very good. I’m glad to see that you’re not as culturally illiterate as the rest of your generation. Vichy humans—that’s what I call the collaborators. These earrings identify them to the local nest of vampires. They are spared.”
“Where’d you get them?”
Zev’s face was hidden in the shadows. “Their previous owners . . . lost them. Put it on.”
“My ear’s not pierced.”
A gnarled hand moved into the moonlight. Joe saw a tong needle clasped between the thumb and index finger.
“That I can fix,” Zev said. “Maybe you shouldn’t see this,” Zev whispered as they crouched in the deep shadows on St. Anthony’s western flank. Joe squinted at him in the darkness, puzzled.
“You lay a guilt trip on me to get me here, now you’re having second thoughts?”
“It is horrible like I can’t tell you.”
Joe thought about that. There was enough horror in the world outside St. Anthony’s. What purpose did it serve to see what was going on inside?
Because it used to be my church.
Even though he’d only been an associate pastor, never fully in charge, and even though he’d been unceremoniously yanked from the post, St. Anthony’s had been his first parish. He was here. He might as well know what they were doing inside.
“Show me.”
Zev led him to a pile of rubble under a smashed stained glass window. He pointed up to where faint light flickered from inside.
“Look in there.”
“You’re not coming?”
“Once was enough, thank you.”
Joe climbed as carefully, as quietly as he could, all the while becoming increasingly aware of a growing stench like putrid, rotting meat. It was coming from inside, wafting through the broken window. Steeling himself, he straightened up and peered over the sill.
For a moment he was disoriented, like someone peering out the window of a city apartment and seeing the rolling hills of a Kansas farm. This could not be the interior of St. Anthony’s.
In the flickering light of hundreds of sacramental candles he saw that the walls were bare, stripped of all their ornaments, of the plaques for the stations of the cross; the dark wood along the wall was scarred and gouged wherever there had been anything
remotely resembling a cross. The floor too was mostly bare, the pews ripped from their neat rows and hacked to pieces, their splintered remains piled high at the rear under the choir balcony.
And the giant crucifix that had dominated the space behind the altar—only a portion of it remained. The cross-pieces on each side had been sawed off and so now an armless, life-size Christ hung upside down against the rear wall of the sanctuary.
Joe took in all that in a flash, then his attention was drawn to the unholy congregation that peopled St. Anthony’s this night. The collaborators—the Vichy humans, as Zev called them—made up the periphery of the group. They looked like normal, everyday people but each was wearing a crescent moon earring.
But the others, the group gathered in the sanctuary—Joe felt his hackles rise at the sight of them. They surrounded the altar in a tight knot. Their pale, bestial faces, bereft of the slightest trace of human warmth, compassion, or decency, were turned upward. His gorge rose when he saw the object of their rapt attention.
A naked teenage boy—his hands tied behind his back, was suspended over the altar by his ankles. He was sobbing and choking, his eyes wide and vacant with shock, his mind all but gone. The skin had been flayed from his forehead—apparently the Vichy had found an expedient solution to the cross tattoo—and blood ran in a slow stream down his abdomen and chest from his freshly truncated genitals. And beside him, standing atop the altar, a bloody-mouthed creature dressed in a long cassock. Joe recognized the thin shoulders, the graying hair trailing from the balding crown, but was shocked at the crimson vulpine grin he flashed to the things clustered below him.
“Now,” said the creature in a lightly accented voice Joe had heard hundreds of times from St. Anthony’s pulpit.
Father Alberto Palmeri.
And from the group a hand reached up with a straight razor and drew it across the boy’s throat. As the blood flowed down over his face, those below squeezed and struggled forward like hatchling vultures to catch the falling drops and scarlet trickles in their open mouths.
Joe fell away from the window and vomited. He felt Zev grab his arm and lead him away. He was vaguely aware of crossing the street and heading toward the ruined legal office.
“Why in God’s name did you want me to see that?”
Zev looked across the office toward the source of the words. He could see a vague outline where Father Joe sat on the floor, his back against the wall, the open bottle of scotch in his hand. The priest had taken one drink since their return, no more.
“I thought you should know what they were doing to your church.”
“So you’ve said. But what’s the reason behind that one?”
Zev shrugged in the darkness. “I’d heard you weren’t doing well, that even before everything else began falling apart, you had already fallen apart. So when I felt it safe to get away, I came to see you. Just as I expected, I found a man who was angry at everything and letting it eat up his guderim. I thought maybe it would be good to give that man something very specific to be angry at.”
“You bastard!” Father Joe whispered. “Who gave you the right?”
“Friendship gave me the right, Joe. I should hear that you are rotting away and do nothing? I have no congregation of my own anymore so I turned my attention on you. Always I was a somewhat meddlesome rabbi.”
“Still are. Out to save my soul, ay?”
“We rabbis don’t save souls. Guide them maybe, hopefully give them direction. But only you can save your soul, Joe.”
Silence hung in the air for a while. Suddenly the crescent-moon earring Zev had given Father Joe landed in the puddle of moonlight on the floor between them.
“Why do they do it?” the priest said. “The Vichy—why do they collaborate?”
“The first were quite unwilling, believe me. They cooperated because their wives and children were held hostage by the vampires. But before too long the dregs of humanity began to slither out from under their rocks and offer their services in exchange for the immortality of vampirism.”
“Why bother working for them? Why not just bare your throat to the nearest bloodsucker?”
“That’s what I thought at first,” Zev said. “But as I witnessed the Lakewood holocaust I detected the vampires’ pattern. They can choose who joins their ranks, so after they’ve fully infiltrated a population, they change their tactics. You see, they don’t want too many of their kind concentrated in one area. It’s like too many carnivores in one forest—when the herds of prey are wiped out, the predators starve. So they start to employ a different style of killing. For only when the vampire draws the life’s blood from the throat with its fangs does the victim become one of them. Anyone drained as in the manner of that boy in the church tonight dies a true death. He’s as dead now as someone run over by a truck. He will not rise tomorrow night.”
“I get it,” Father Joe said. “The Vichy trade their daylight services and dirty work to the vampires now for immortality later on.”
“Correct.”
There was no humor in the soft laugh that echoed across the room from Father Joe.
“Swell. I never cease to be amazed at our fellow human beings. Their capacity for good is exceeded only by their ability to debase themselves.”
“Hopelessness does strange things, Joe. The vampires know that. So they rob us of hope. That’s how they beat us. They transform our friends and neighbors and leaders into their own, leaving us feeling alone, completely cut off. Some of us can’t take the despair and kill ourselves.”
“Hopelessness,” Joe said. “A potent weapon.”
After a long silence, Zev said, “So what are you going to do now, Father Joe?”
Another bitter laugh from across the room.
“I suppose this is the place where I declare that I’ve found new purpose in life and will now go forth into the world as a fearless vampire killer.”
“Such a thing would be nice.”
“Well screw that. I’m only going as far as across the street.”
“To St. Anthony’s?”
Zev saw Father Joe take a swig from the Scotch bottle and then screw the cap on tight.
“Yeah. To see if there’s anything I can do over there.”
“Father Palmeri and his nest might not like that.”
“I told you, don’t call him Father. And screw him. Nobody can do what he’s done and get away with it. I’m taking my church back.”
In the dark, behind his beard, Zev smiled.
V
Joe stayed up the rest of the night and let Zev sleep. The old guy needed his rest. Sleep would have been impossible for Joe anyway. He was too wired. He sat up and watched St. Anthony’s.
They left before first light, dark shapes drifting out the front doors and down the stone steps like parishioners leaving a predawn service. Joe felt his back teeth grind as he scanned the group for Palmeri, but he couldn’t make him out in the dimness. By the time the sun began to peek over the rooftops and through the trees to the east, the street outside was deserted.
He woke Zev and together they approached the church. The heavy oak and iron front doors, each forming half of a pointed arch, were closed. He pulled them open and fastened the hooks to keep them open. Then he walked through the vestibule and into the nave.
Even though he was ready for it, the stench backed him up a few steps. When his stomach settled, he forced himself ahead, treading a path between the two piles of shattered and splintered pews. Zev walked beside him, a handkerchief pressed over his mouth.
Last night he had thought the place a shambles. He saw now that it was worse. The light of day poked into all the corners, revealing everything that had been hidden by the warm glow of the candles. Half a dozen rotting corpses hung from the ceiling—he hadn’t noticed them last night—and others were sprawled on the floor against the walls. Some of the bodies were in pieces. Behind the chancel rail a headless female torso was draped over the front of the pulpit. To the left stood the statue of Mary
. Someone had fitted her with foam rubber breasts and a huge dildo. And at the rear of the sanctuary was the armless Christ hanging head down on the upright of his cross.
“My church,” he whispered as he moved along the path that had once been the center aisle, the aisle brides used to walk down with their fathers. “Look what they’ve done to my church!”
Joe approached the huge block of the altar. Once it had been backed against the far wall of the sanctuary, but he’d had it moved to the front so that he could celebrate Mass facing his parishioners. Solid Carrara marble, but you’d never know it now. So caked with dried blood, semen, and feces it could have been made of Styrofoam.
His revulsion was fading, melting away in the growing heat of his rage, drawing the nausea with it. He had intended to clean up the place but there was so much to be done, too much for two men. It was hopeless.
“Faddajoe?”
He spun at the sound of the strange voice. A thin figure stood uncertainly in the open doorway. A man of about fifty edged forward timidly.
“Faddajoe, izat you?”
Joe recognized him now. Carl Edwards. A twitchy little man who used to help pass the collection basket at 10:30 Mass on Sundays. A trans-plantee from Jersey City—hardly anyone around here was originally from around here. His face was sunken, his eyes feverish as he stared at Joe.
“Yes, Carl. It’s me.”
“Oh, thank God!” He ran forward and dropped to his knees before Joe. He began to sob. “You come back! Thank God, you come back!”
Joe pulled him to his feet.
“Come on now, Carl. Get a grip.”
“You come back to save us, ain’tcha? God sent ya here to punish him, din’t He?”
“Punish whom?”
“Fadda Palmeri! He’s one a dem! He’s da woist a alia dem! He—”
“I know,” Joe said. “I know.”
“Oh, it’s so good to have ya back, Fadda Joe! We ain’t knowed what to do since da suckers took ova. We been prayin fa someone like youse an now ya here. It’s a freakin’ miracle!”
A Soft Barren Aftershock Page 74
